October 15, 2010 - Adios My Blogging Friends!

And goodbye to my non-blogging followers, too!

We'll be leaving really early tomorrow morning, but I have to take the cable modem back this afternoon, so I'll be shutting down my blog now.

I'm not ready to go, by any means. I did, with Mr. Granny's help, get most of the pots and buckets stacked in the shed, the tomato cages put away for the winter, and the hoses all drained, coiled and stored. The tomato fortress never did get torn down, so that will be a job for next spring. Only half the main garden paths got raked clean, but the vegetation laying there will diminish a bit by March, when I'll feel a bit more enthusiastic about gardening. Cleaning up the garden is so much easier after a freeze. It's rather difficult for me to tear out plants that are lush and green yet, even though I know nobody will be harvesting them.

Goodbye, north garden.

Goodbye, east garden, kennel garden and green, green grass..

Goodbye, pretty cosmos, I wish I hadn't killed the rest of you! Just imagine, if one of you can be so beautiful, what six of you would have looked like.

If I decide to grow a garden in Arizona this winter, it will be just a tiny one like last year. I do have a project to take up a bit of my spare time, though. Last night my daughter asked what would happen if my blog went down and was lost forever. She said that would be terrible, because she was sure the grandchildren would love to look back at it in years to come. I checked, and there is a way to back up Blogger, but it doesn't do the photos, so they would all have to be reinserted. Soooo....my winter project is to copy and paste each blog, in HTML, and save them all to my computer (and a couple other sources, such as external hard drive and CD) under their publishing dates. I did ten of them last night, so I only have 523 to go. Five-hundred-twenty-four after this one.

Well, it's time to take the modem back. Let's all keep our fingers crossed that I'll have internet access when we get to Arizona.

Granny, you do know that there's a place called blog2print.com that will make a book for you from your posts, right? You could do it year by year or season by season and choose to insert comments or not. It would save you a lot of time and effort, that's for sure.

Hello, all. I took my modem back, but they said to keep it, so I'm back on line until we leave in the morning.

About the blog backup programs:

Yes, I know there is a print to book, and I've been tempted, but I actually started doing just that last year on my own hard drive, by copying everything (including the photos) into Open Office. I kind of pooped out on the project, for a while, then I had that problem with the laptop, when I backed up everything to the external hard drive, reformatted, then found out the backup program hadn't worked properly. I lost the "book"! I'll be smarter this time, and make sure I have more than one copy.

Sydney Gardener, all the photos are already on Picasa, as well as in a folder (dated) on my laptop. So far I've not found any program that will back up the text and the photos together.

I have already used and saved the blog to an .xml file with Blogger's backup. It saves all the settings and the comments, but I see no HTML where the photos belong.

Therefore, I have concluded the simple copy and paste is the best way to go. And I'll have a lot of time to get it done this winter ;-)

I'm still here...the kids are on their way with pizza, then I'll pack up the laptop, hit the shower and get to bed early. We'd like to be on the road by around 6 in the morning, and there are always last minute things to attend to. Like setting the heat pump to 45F, unplugging everything, throwing the breakers on the large appliances, getting Annie's Dramamine down her throat (I'd better save a little chunk of pizza for that!). I'm washing refrigerator and freezer shelves now, just about finished with the grunt work.